Shayna Marmar

Educator and founder of Honeypie Cooking

Philadelphia-area native Shayna Marmar’s work has long focused on the intersection of food and learning. After graduating from college with a degree in early childhood education, she took a teaching job in the San Francisco Bay area. Before long she was finding ways to merge cooking and teaching. She launched her business, Honeypie Cooking, as a side hustle while spending her weekdays in a California classroom.

Becoming a cooking teacher was probably inevitable for Marmar. “I started collecting cookbooks at age 13,” she says. In 2012 she moved back to the Philadelphia area to be near family and turned her Honeypie project into her full-time job. She continues to specialize in working with kids, as well as special-needs populations. Today she creates culinary curriculum and teaches cooking classes at schools, community centers, libraries and more. “I can teach cooking anywhere,” she says.

“Teaching people to cook vegetables in an approachable way, in way that makes vegetables delicious, is my passion,” says Marmar. It’s those food values that drew her to Tamar Adler’s An Everlasting Meal (Scribner, 2012). The small volume is a manifesto for the unfussy, thrifty home cook who wants to eat well while minimizing effort and food waste while making creative use of seasonal produce.

“It’s everything I love about California cooking—it’s easy, casual and special.” Marmar is especially drawn to the following soup recipe for its use of unpretentious and unprocessed staples. “The recipe and the writing are economic and poetic at the same time,” she says.